A found photo of men at (weird) work, from the 1977 project called “Evidence”, by American artists Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan. It is in the New Museum show called “Ghosts in the Machine”, where the Daily Pic is lingering all week. The show could have been all about the glory of technology – as some of the art in it is. But instead, curators have carefully balanced the upsides, downsides and, especially, strange sides of tech. Mandel and Sultan culled their images from all kinds of government and corporate archives, and their project shows how thoroughly science and technology have been incorporated into our world, and yet how little most of us can make of their advances. This photo captures the feeling we get from most of its mates: That scientists and engineers are alien beings doing alien things. They are the ghosts in our machine. (Courtesy the artists and Stephen Wirtz Gallery, San Francisco) Mike Mandel's name was misspelled in an earlier version of this post.
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